International

Monday, November 3, 2014

THE MOTION PICTURE

Muybridge's work was
specifically created for the purpose of stopping action. It was analytical; he
strove to freeze motion, to hold still for our contemplation the most rapid
muscular movements of man and beast. In doing so he was unwittingly creating
the basis for moving pictures. All that was necessary to recreate the motion he
had analyzed was to put the individual photographs in rapid succession before
the eyes of an audience.

Rough hand-drawn analyses had long been
shown in toys, the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope. Marey had tried
unsuccessfully to make a scientific study of animal locomotion by this means in
1867. Posed photographs had been projected in sequence by Heyl in Philadelphia in 1870. But
Muybridge was the first to show action photographs in one of the primitive
motion-picture machines. To do this, he fastened a number of slides on a large
disk. On the same axis but revolving in the opposite direction was another disk
with slots along its radius. An arc light, a condenser, and a lens threw the
images of the slides onto a screen. The motion recreated this way was of very
brief duration. Each revolution of the wheel duplicated the previous action on
the screen, so that the audience viewed a horse monotonously going through his
paces again and again.